In the networking side of the world, vendors often seek to differentiate their solutions not just based on features and functionality, but on form-factor, as well. Using a descriptor to impart an understanding of the deployment form-factor of a particular solution has always been quite common: appliance, hardware, platform, etc… Sometimes these terms come from analysts, other times they come from vendors themselves. Regardless of where they originate, they quickly propagate and unfortunately often do so without the benefit of a clear definition.
A reader recently asked a question that reminded me that we’ve done just that as we cloud computing and virtualization creep into our vernacular. Quite simply the question was, “What’s the definition of a Soft ADC and vADC?” That’s actually an interesting question as it’s more broadly applicable than just to ADCs. For example, the last several years we’ve been hearing about “Soft WOC (WAN Optimization Controller)” in addition to just plain old WOC and the definition of Soft WOC is very similar to Soft ADC. The definitions are, if not well understood and often used, consistent across the entire application delivery realm - from WAN to LAN to cloud.
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